Category Archives: Blog

Its back! Our popular Cocktail Hack is happening again to celebrate London Tech Week. Event Tech Lab is holding its Open Office session on Tuesday 21st June at KPMG’s new Huckletree Shoreditch event venue in Finsbury Square, London. This is an event for eventtech developers, start-ups, eventtech companies, event professionals, marketers and investors wanting to see the freshest event technologies that have recently been launched. The event also includes the popular #CocktailHack. You have the chance to create London Tech Week’s celebratory cocktail. Plus, ibtm World is launching their Tech Watch Competition 2016.

5 minute pitches and demonstrations from six of the freshest event technology start-ups. See the latest in event technology with pitches from Holland, Switzerland, the UK and USA.

#CocktailHack

No coding required. Just join in the fun. Come along to the event with your innovative cocktail recipe. You can enter as a team or we will put you into a team. Our professional barmen from Exquisite Cocktailswill assist you in making up your winning cocktail to be tasted by the audience and our expert judges. Prize for the best #CocktailHack. If you wish to use an ingredient that is not normally available behind a bar, bring this with you. We will have a fully stocked bar with everything else you need. Please find the bar stock list at this link:https://www.dropbox.com/s/yfq2zr4uxm38bte/CocktailHack Bar Stock List.docx?dl=0

If you have any questions about ingredients, email: james@eventtechlab.com

The Kitchen and Bath Industry Show (KBIS) is the largest international kitchen and bath industry trade event. Owned by the National Kitchen and Bath Association (NKBA), KBIS is dedicated to helping the industry move forward through education, collaboration, and exposure to the latest products and innovative designs. KBIS is produced by Emerald Expositions, a leading operator of large business-to-business trade shows in the United States, producing more than 50 trade shows and over 100 face-to-face events per year. KBIS is an amazing show that has run for more than 50 consecutive years – talk about longevity! Rebecca Corbett, Marketing Manager for KBIS, is in charge of keeping the momentum going.

Improving on Excellence

In the past, Rebecca had succeeded in that effort mostly via the traditional marketing channels of print and direct mail. While still working, the effectiveness of these channels was starting to trail off. And with the explosion of digital marketing, Rebecca knew that she couldn’t afford to ignore it any longer. “We had always used email to complement our traditional marketing efforts. But results just seemed ordinary, and open rates were starting to drop off dramatically. We needed a better way to use digital to get in front of our audience and boost attendance.” – Rebecca Corbett, Marketing Manager at Emerald Expositions When it came to plan for KBIS 2016 came around Rebecca was ready to make this year the one that saw a major investment in digital marketing. So she started looking at some of the options for digital marketing tools and services. Rebecca found the overwhelming and confusing landscape that is marketing and advertising technology. In fact, the research process was so daunting that Rebecca was considering putting off the decision altogether.

An Easy, Event-Tailored Digital Marketing Platform?

Then a colleague in Emerald’s Photo group talked to Rebecca about the results he had seen using Feathr. The results and experience he mentioned were impressive, but Rebecca was tentative – the digital marketing world still seemed complicated and didn’t seem suited to the work of an event organizer. Despite her doubt, she figured it was worth a call. So she reached out and spoke with Aidan, the co-founder of Feathr. After some mutual learning it became apparent that there was a great fit between Rebecca’s need for an easy-yet-powerful way to reach potential attendees online and Feathr’s Event Marketing Cloud. “The fact that Feathr was a digital marketing platform geared just for events was very appealing to me.” – Rebecca Corbett, Marketing Manager at Emerald Expositions. Rebecca’s main goal with digital marketing was to boost the attendance of KBIS 2016. Feathr’s programmatic advertising, which intelligently retargets event website visitors with optimized ads on other websites to encourage re-engagement, seemed perfectly geared to help with that.

Feathr’s programmatic advertising gets your event back in front of the eyes of your website visitors.

Rebecca was ecstatic. She had found an accessible digital marketing tool designed specifically for events and couldn’t wait to get started. She began by placing Feathr’s Super Pixel on the main KBIS website and on the sister site www.kbbonline.com, the home of Kitchen & Bath Business magazine, several months before the show.

Implementing a Robust Retargeting Strategy with Feathr

With her pixel in place, Feathr’s analytics showed Rebecca real-time information about her digital audience and their interactions with her websites. She was then able to organize her site’s visitors by segmenting them into the different audience groups she would later retarget. By setting up her analytics early, Rebecca built up a huge audience and had ample time to plan her future ad campaigns. Rebecca successfully launched not one, but five different retargeting campaigns catered to different segments of her audience. Working closely with her Customer Success Manager at Feathr, Rebecca periodically switched out her ad creatives to avoid “banner blindness” and continually engage her potential attendees.

The Results of Well-Planned and Executed Campaigns

Her eight-day early rate and three-month general audience campaigns had particularly impressive conversions – driving more than 700 registrations for less than $1,500 of media spend. Rebecca’s overall results for KBIS 2016 were outstanding. She achieved a $3.56 CPA average across all of her campaigns, impacting 11% of KBIS’ total audience. Overall, her ROI through Feathr reached $59,000.

And KBIS 2017 is Already in the Works

Rebecca has already renewed her Feathr subscription for KBIS 2017. In addition to retargeting, she intends to leverage Feathr’s referral marketing features, which allows her to easily promote KBIS to the audiences of her sponsors and exhibitors. With an additional year of analytics data (built up from the 2016 show) and the experience she has gained using Feathr, Rebecca is fully prepared to maximize the performance of her digital marketing for KBIS 2017.

Wow what a show! We had 10 start ups exhibiting in the Event Tech Lab zone. Our Fresh Tech For Your Event session in the tech theatre attracted the largest audience in the education sessions over the 2 day show. Well done to all the start ups that pitched live. It was awesome.

Event Tech Lab’s February Open Office features some great new start-ups and a panel of experts from Barclays Bank, DRP Group and George P Johnson on ‘How Much Tech Do I Use For My Event?’ Join us at the Digital Catapult London – one of the city’s amazing new tech venues – for an evening of fresh tech, education and networking.

Next up – our panel discussion will explore the issues and suggest tips on ‘How Much Tech Do I Use For My Event?’. Emma Stoker from Barclays Bank, Ben Wallace from DRP and Nick Riggall from George P Johnson are your experts for the evening. The programme is followed by networking over beer,wine and pizza.

The pitches start at 7pm. The panel discussion starts at 7.45pm. The event runs until 9pm.

Glisser was awarded Gold at the MassChallenge UK Finals last week, effectively placing us in the top 15 out of 1,700 startups that began the process back in June.

Glisser makes presentations interactive – it takes regular PowerPoint or Keynote presentations and pushes them out live to audience mobile devices, slide-by-slide, as they are presented. It then enables members of the audience to interact with the presenter or each other, ask questions, and share content, and collects valuable feedback for event organisers. Attendees can also electronically mark-up the slides with notes, and keep them for future reference

MassChallenge is the world’s largest startup accelerator. It doesn’t take equity or fees, but teams up with businesses like IBM and NatWest so startups can compete for a share of £500,000 prize money – Glisser received £25,000 last night (in the form of a very large cheque).

Mike Piddock Founder at Glisser said

“This is a massive endorsement for what we are doing – making presentations more engaging, participatory, and data-driven. Hot on the heals of the Event Technology of the Year awards, where we were the only UK company in the finals, it’s been a sensational week.”

Less than a year after launching, our client list now includes i2i Events, Investec, Visa, The Design Council, Grant Thornton, Bloomberg and three UK Government departments.

I was speaking to two enterprise salespersons recently as we explored why the engagement & learning is typically broken workshops and conferences.

Although I am a firm believer that every moment is a learning opportunity about oneself as well as the world around us…BUT let’s face it, we are inundated with emails, digital content, and marketing in general. So most companies struggle to win the “hearts and minds” of their employees. Even harder is winning that of the partners that you need to grow the business.

Most companies know that:

Better trained employees and partners = Better bottom line.

A more diverse employee base and teams result in better business outcomes.

Employees are increasingly disengaged and less loyal. In fact, according to a 2014 Gallup poll, 51% of U.S. employees are disengaged.

So many companies continue to spend a LOT of money on e-learning, external and internal training, roadshows, workshops, kick-off meetings etc. Yet many organisations struggle to understand if their training is effective.

Here’s 4 signs that your training sucks. It sucks because:

1. It’s not measurable

It’s critical that you have a goal of what your average participant’s knowledge level should be. Start with baselining what your participants know before they begin the specific training. Then assess again after the training. And then compare what each participant knows and doesn’t know, and then deciding what action to take next.

Ideally you’re not just measuring conceptual knowledge, but how your participants internalise the knowledge and demonstrate it in action.

2. It’s not reinforced

Training shouldn’t be a ONE Big Bang-set-and-forget approach. People’s mind are overwhelmed with information, and you should follow up a few months to see if the key points have been turned from learning concept into action.

3. It’s not updated

Typically training materials becomes outdated very quickly, especially for product training for innovative companies, or highly competitive industries. It’s really vital in these scenarios to make sure your training is up-to-date. For example, you wouldn’t want your salespeople to find out that a new competitor is on the scene from a customer, now would you!

4. It’s not memorable

Let’s face it. Most training falls into a spectrum — boring on one side and fun. Consumer marketers have realised that people don’t buy products, they buy the experiences they can create because of the product.

Why should training be any different? It can be both fun AND meaningful.

So let’s not throw money down the drain by continuing with boring presentations.

I’ll finish this blog with how most people experience fun as you start thinking of how you can reinvent your training investment:

When they solve problems

When they are exploring

When they are surprised (and delighted)

When they win something

When they get recognised for something

Theresa Lim is CEO & Founder of Play2Lead — a multiple award-winning gamified and social audience engagement platform that helps companies and their agencies increase customer and employee engagement at live events and online.

Dr Jennifer Otter Bickerdike, a world authority on Fandom, will be delivering the keynote entitled ‘How to Turn a One Time User into a Dedicated Fan’ at our next event on Wednesday 16th September, Google Campus in London. The session will take attendees on a journey to better understand their users and convert them into being their advocates. Embodying the unique combination of real-world experience and academic knowledge, Dr. Jennifer Otter Bickerdike has over 20 years of experience working with tastemakers and cultural provocateurs such as Facebook, Interscope Geffen A & M and L.A.M.B.

Jennifer’s first book Fandom, Image and Authenticity: Joy Devotion and the Second Lives of Kurt Cobain and Ian Curtis was published in October 2014. She was recently featured in Channel 4’s holiday blockbuster Frozen at Christmas, and is currently working on three different books about popular culture and media.

Event Tech Lab has secured stage-time at IMEX in Las Vegas in October and also at ibtm World, Barcelona in November to present our stable of start-ups. Both events are a great opportunities to promote event tech to an international audience.

Opportunity 1: IMEX Las Vegas, 13 – 15 October.

Event Tech Lab will be running daily sessions on the freshest new eventtech available – that’s you! As this is a short session, you will not be able to present in person. If you would like your products to be included we will need you to forward us a few slides accompanied by some screen shots or a short 2 minute video we can play.

Please email me if you would like to take part and we can then discuss how you want to represent your company. The deadline for letting me know is 4th September.

Opportunity 2: ibtm World Barcelona, 17-19 November.

Event Tech Lab is hosting a one-hour session on event technology.

For this session we would like to you either pitch in person or beam in via Google Hangouts. I will be on stage talking about eventtech and be using your company to illustrate an element of how technology can be used to enhance an event.

Pitches will last for 5 minutes. If you would like to participate,again please let me know by 4th September.

London Tech Week is going all out to feature event technology. Thanks Boris! A hackathon, start-up pitches, a conference, education sessions, networking socials and even the world’s first #CocktailHack. This is the first year where event technology is creating its own distinct identity at the international tech event. An event that attracts over 40 000 attendees to London.

#EventTechHack 13 -14 June at Campus London
Concerto Group sponsored the innovation of event technology through its partnership with Event Tech Lab. The hackathon attracted more than 50 event technology developers, designers and idea generators, who creating new applications for the events industry.

Event Tech Pitches & #CocktailHack 17 June at Campus London
Event Tech Lab’s Open Office sessions introduce new event technology from around the world via five minute live or Google Hangout presentations. New tech from Australia, France, UK and USA will be featured. Event professionals will also be treated to a world first – #CocktailHack – a no coding required cocktail competition where #eventprofs can create their own cocktail to win prizes. Sponsored by ibtm World, Barcelona.

Tech Fest 19 June at the ICC, EXCeL London
This annual event technology conference goes from strength to strength. This year’s speakers include Sallie Coventry from Reed Travel Exhibitions, Leslie Robertson, MD at Technology4Events and more. It’s all about the trends, the use and greater adoption of event technology at events.